The House

THE HOUSE

The House is going to eat her.

One day, her bedsheets will entangle her flailing limbs at exactly 5:45am, the precise moment when her alarm wakes her. Because what's the point in putting so much energy and effort into that first burst of terror while your victim sleeps? The House is pragmatic and practical in that way.

Resourceful, too. Those sheets will entwine her arms, legs and torso: striped tentacles of that beast under the mattress, damp with that woman's sweat. They'll snake about her head, the 800-thread-count sheets wrenching her towards the stone hearth: The House's gaping maw.

The iron-wrought fireplace grating will unweld itself and reveal its true purpose: snagging human flesh with the efficiency of a mako's jaws, or the thousand-toothed beak of the angriest Tennessee snapping turtle.

By this time the woman may have regained enough of her primal faculties to affect an escape... She's not quite the kind to stay and fight, but run she will if possible. Flames will burst forth from the fireplace, eagerly and hungrily licking the air in anticipation.

The floorboards themselves will buckle and warp in an effort to twist her ankles. The Tibetan rug will whorl about her calves, red and blue and yellow lotuses battering her somehow into submission.

Desperately she'll grasp for the doorknb, now rubbery and pliant, resistant to any turning. The woman will shriek, and the woodgrain of her front door will morph into an oaken deaths-head, cackling madly as it mocks her heart-stopping throes of her impending doom.

With her final ounce of strength and the last frayed threads of her sanity, she'll leap forward into the iron-wood jaws of this portal of death.

In an instant she's surrounded by blinding light, and the hot breath of The House is replaced with the cool breeze of the outside air.

She can only gasp: "Emergency! Emergency!"